Retail Brands should be monitoring Foursquare; rewarding customers

I am sure someone else has already thought of this but the idea came to me after I ousted @Mediaphyter from her mayorship of 24 Hour Fitness on Arques in Sunnyvale. It would have been awesome to walk through the doors prepping for my work out and see something like this staring at me on the wall:

The fact is that Foursquare is already working with some local businesses in rewarding customers based on the data behind foursquare usage. See the following screen shot showing a bar in NYC rewarding the mayor with free drinks.

What a great opportunity for retail brands to reward customers and build loyalty programs. A recent study by Cone found that 58% of consumers who already engage with brands on the social web would be more willing to engage if incentivized with free products, coupons or discounts. I am surprised that more companies haven’t figured this out yet. A few places I frequent is Red Robin in Rivermark, multipleStarbucks in the valley, the Prolific Oven, Safeway to name a few. I would love to get discounted BBQ wings, a latte or two, soup & salad from Prolific and 10% off my next purchase from the grocery story. And yes, I would tell others about it too.

Foursquare is growing. Check out their unique visitors as reported by Compete; and I think this just counts web traffic and not visits from mobile devices.

And as Scobleizer said a few months ago, Foursquare will be on Oprah in less than 40o days; and then the floodgates will open.